Leonardo DiCaprio stars as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a former member of an anarchic left-wing revolutionary group French 75. He guards his teenager Charlene, although both have taken on the identities of Bob and Willa as per their agreements in a witness protection facility. Unwittingly, they come into the crosshairs of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a man who has a personal vendetta with French 75. What ensues is a fairly exhilarating chase across the Californian desert, combining action with gallows humour.
The visual splendour and the momentous production efforts are entirely palpable. One Battle After Another is an odyssey of sorts, lasting nearly three hours in total. DiCaprio – the clean-cut handsome American of Catch Me if You Can (Steven Spielberg, 2002) and The Aviator (Martin Scorsese, 2004) – settles nicely into the role of a schlubby stoner jumping from one identity to another. He’s excellent, as is Penn as the foe cautioning the world against a life spent in perpetual exile.
The “heroes” are anti-materialist and the “villains” conform to rules, traditions and corporation. while not wholly original, Anderson sells this picture because it looks exquisitely beautiful, framing the Californian backdrop like a character of its own. Sandy the colours surround the leads, tempting each of them into wilder and more erratic behaviour the longer they wade across the plains. As Ghetto/Bob plunges headfirst into the mania, the perilous scenario becomes more outrageous: guns fire all around him.
This movie is neither a comedy in the strictest sense nor an action drama, and yet there are imprints of both schools on the finished piece. Teyana Taylor has an absolute blast as Perfidia, a heavily pregnant woman firing bullets into the air with the gusto of a gangster from a 1930s’ feature. One Battle After Another is rousing in many places. The idealistic militia left-wing band are both excited and unnerved by the lifestyle they have chosen, especially as they run into mighty foes with larger amounts of money.
The cast is impressively diverse, with every actor’s race adding a kinetic undertone to the finished picturePerfidia is a black woman, which adds to the urgency and tension. She could face an end harsher than a prison cell should US authorities ever catch her. Lockjaw, the main nemesis, slots nicely into the Protestant upper classes, much as hispanic Sgt. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) can sympathise more heavily with the poorer sects. In a country as money-hungry as this one, citizens survive by the power of their toting guns.
Anderson’s feature is hardly subtle. One Battle After Another succeeds in its ambition to fuse tension with chuckles, and while the production is densely focused on the visuals, there are moments of pathos. Willa/Charlene (Chase Infiniti) tries to go about her day at high-school, before she bumps into a messenger reciting from Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. The pain, the anguish, the excitement and confusion are all there on the adolescent’s face, as if to calmly remind the viewer that this is just an ordinary person caught in the most extraordinary of events and moments. It is human interactions that ground the most sensational of plots.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas on Friday, September 26th. On VoD on December 2nd.
